About Me

Jim is the author of eight novels, three memoirs and four business books. He made a covered wagon and horseback trip across Texas to retrace the journey his ancestors had made two generations earlier and wrote Biscuits Across the Brazos to chronicle the trip. He traveled the team roping circuit as an amateur and worked roundups on big ranches. Working beside real cowboys sent him back to writing. Using lessons he had learned from more than 10,000 client interviews over thirty years and memories from his rural Texas roots, Jim published five novels in his Follow the Rivers series and three in the Tee Jessup/Riverby series. He has also published three memoirs and story collections.He has been a Writers Digest International Book Contest Finalist.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

A New Review for Rails to a River

This review is from: Rails to a River: A Long Awakening (Kindle Edition)

There are great storytellers and literary
storytellers across this land. Jim Ainsworth is both. In Rails to a
River, as in his other novels, Jim is a sculptor who carves the right
words from our language and strings them together with the beauty of a
poet and the sudden impact of a pistol shot.Just read a brief
passage, and you will understand immediately what I am talking about:
“But not even Father Bob can explain why Tee was spared, why it seems as
if he has been plucked by some malevolent force from a life he
understood and loved and set down into a suit and tie existence in, a
world college professors called a corporate culture. The old priest
could not explain why two events, sixty-seven days apart, five hundred
miles apart, shattered Tee’s hopes, rudely maneuvered his life down a
road he did not want to travel toward a place he does not want to be.”

Jim
Ainsworth understands the storms that threaten to destroy men like Tee
Jessup, that leave Tee adrift in a world that views him as a man who
doesn’t belong. A single moment of time has changed his life forever. He
probably should not have survived the accident at a remote railroad
crossing. He probably should not have awakened from the coma. It might
have been better if he hadn’t. All that he loved has been stolen from
himHe had always been at home in the wide-open spaces of a West
Texas ranch. His home is gone. He drives away from the ranch. He heads
to the city. He heads to the great unknown. He is a man most miserable, a
stranger in a strange place. He works. He fails. His wife leaves him.
She takes his son. He assumes it’s because he has become a failure. Her
reasons are far more sinister. But what are they?

Tee faces a
journey he does not want to take and searches for those stolen moments
of his life that he may never find. It is a journey that the reader
takes right along step-by-step with Tee Jessup as he travels a long,
winding, and unfamiliar road. When Tee is lost, we are lost. When Tee
hurts, we feel his pain. Tee Jessup is no longer a stranger. He’s a
friend. He’s family. Jim Ainsworth has the rare ability to make sure of
it. Jim writes about the West, but Rails to a River is not a Western.
Tee is entangled with the mysteries that surround his life, but Rails to
a River is not a mystery. Tee searches for the love he has lost – the
love of the woman and his love for the land – but Rails to the River is
not a romance. It’s life.

If you want to read a literary work of
fiction with a great story that has a lot of heart, read Jim Ainsworth.
It’s life as only one man has lived it, life as only Jim Ainsworth can
write it.